EXTRACT II

Literature Review
Neither Self, Nor Other, or
the Other Without the Self

As the new millennia advances feminist scholars, queer theorists and male continental
philosophers at both sides of the atlantic have worked together-and-apart to produce
alternative scenarios that allow us to recover from the aftershock of the crisis of reason
without falling back to delusional postmodern nostalgia or cynical detachment. After
centuries of metaphysical apparatuses operating in favour of dualistic, oppositional,
hierarchical and normative systems of knowledge, the relationships between self-and-
other have been severely damaged, producing deep ceasures, lending Agamben’s
lexicon, and cannibalistic fractures which, under today’s conditions have become
virtually impossible to overcome without discarding rationality and normative images
of thought altogether. Ever since Auschwitz, Braidotti notes, there is a certain degree of
consensus that the foundational character of rationality and its privileged
epistemological status must be scrutinised, hence following this critical spirit the
authors that will be discussed throughout this literature review have courageously
responded to the historical urgency of changing reason’s face, that is, rethinking
thought, and by doing so, they have open up perceptual universes that allows us to
imagine, feel and experience difference and otherness beyond the subterranean and
lethal streams of reason and Hegelian dialectics. What lies at the heart of this project is,
in my opinion, a form of humanism beyond humanism, a post-human non-
metaphorical figuration in which the speaking subject can become done-and-undone,
bound-and-unbound, embodied-and-disembodied, vanished-and-rematerialised fuelled
by a powerful diffractive optical lens that helps us to contest the already exhausted
worn-out cannibalistic and narcissistic images of the Self. So we can hold accountable
of the weight of our own gravity, and the unescapable interdependence we have with
the non/human, the in/human, the in/animate, the mineral, the animal, so on and so
forth.

In brief, the present section follows the work of six beautiful scholars -Giorgio
Agamben, Judith Butler, Judith/Jack Halberstam, Rossi Braidotti, Karen Barad and
Gloria Anzaldúa- in their journey to discover and create new alternative figurations of
otherness and difference that do not comply with the tyrannic regime of western
dialectics which recycles and subjugate otherness to the shadow of the phallogocentric
 Self. These authors have accepted the challenge of being worth of the complexities our
world worlds, together with the horrors that our historical circumstances has brought
us, without falling in the temptation of postmodern nostalgia, cynical nihilism, or even
worst, empty millennial optimism. They walk on the cracks of what lays in between the
Self/Other divide to brings us the possibility of freeing otherness from the subjugated
position of annexed Other-of-the-Self, so as to make this location expressive of a
different difference, a pure difference, of an entirely new plane of becoming, out of
which differences can multiply and differ from each other without being attached to the
narcissistic and imperial image of the Self.

I. Agamben:
The Inoperative Anthropological Machine:
Towards a Dialectics at a Standstill
Agamben invests his efforts to produce a critique of western metaphysics and Hegelian
dialectics, a system that produces the Self/Other divide by a mechanism he calls
inclusive exclusion, where the Other is constructed as an excess that cannot be
metabolised by the Self and legitimises it only by means of the exclusion of the Other.
Agamben notes that the Self exists upon this condition and requires the creation and
subsequent extermination of the non/human and the in/human, since difference is
conceived as necessarily hierarchical ordained and in direct opposition to the image of
the Self. Agamben coins the term anthropological machine precisely to describe the
permanent rearrangement and actualisation of what counts as ‘human’, and the parade
of Others that are implicated in this process. Being this the case, Agamben do not seek
to ‘destroy’ this ‘machine’ since this move relies on the very same premises that erected
it in the first place, instead he proposes to ‘suspend’ it, or render it inoperative so a new
perceptual universe could be imagined, one that do not require to suffocate and attach
otherness to the shadow of the dialectical and imperial Self. To accomplish this
endeavour he takes from Bataille’s idea of desoeuvrement, also known as
inoperativeness, as the only possible way to avoid the Other being reabsorbed by the
forces of dialectical historical progress. Equally important to Agamben is Heidegger’s
idea of being-held-in-suspense, a particular sensitivity that grants access to a
prelinguistic affective moment in which the very deactivation-of-possibility unveils the
origin of potentiality as the constitutively basis of originary possibilitization. Following
this line, he invokes Benjamin’s idea of Saved Night, an understanding of the world as
fundamentally unsaveable and that can do without mastery. Being the world
‘irreparable’ Agamben lead us to a new understanding of dialectics, one that is at a
standstill where the distinctions between different materialisations no longer
necessitates the creations of an excess as a precondition for the constitution of the
Other.
Agamben is a fascinating writer and although he is often accused of advocating hopelessness, as Leland
de la Durantaye duly informs in his book Agamben; a Critical Introduction (Durantaye; 2009), he
creatively embarks in a beautiful quest to trace genealogically, from literary and philosophical sources,
the inner aporias that haunts western philosophy ever since Aristotle. Instead of falling in the
temptation of pronouncing apocalyptic prophecies, Agamben channels his utter discontent in
something more endurable, that is, in finding alternative figurations to respond to the catastrophe in
which we now live by making the philosophical logos his object of scrutiny. In the following
paragraphs I will attempt, to engage in three of Agamben’s works which I found suitable for the
purpose of this research: The Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The Coming
Community (1993), and The Open: Man and Animal (2004). Hopefully he will enlighten us in the
mysteries that unfolds in-between the Self/Other divide and the mechanisms of its re/production.

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As I mentioned earlier, one of Agamben’s many concerns is the recognition of certain patters imprinted
in our ways of thinking and which have persisted until today. He asserts that western philosophy since
ancient times has set in motion metaphysical apparatuses that produce categorical pairs which are
dialectically implicated via the framing mechanism of inclusive exclusion (Agamben; 1998; 2004).
Although Agamben does not uses the terminology ‘Self’/‘Other’, he is undeniably preoccupied with
otherness as he quite manifests the urgency to advance a critique of Hegelian dialectics. In concrete he
defines otherness as both, the externalisation of what resides in the ‘Self’ and the very condition
through which the ‘Self’ is installed. Ergo, the manoeuvre of framing persé produces an excess which is
interiorised by means of an interdiction, that is, the designation of an exterior to itself that must be
destroyed (Agamben; 1998). Put differently, the metaphysical process in itself of making something
intelligible necessitates a complex surgical apparatus that inflicts divisions/amputations/caesuras that
are permanently rearranged. Since times of Aristotle, writes Agamben, western thought has rested
upon this strategic device as if life is what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be
ceaselessly articulated and divided time and again (Agamben; 2004).

What is at stake in the production of categorical pairs, e.g. human/animal, men/woman, life/death,
organic/mineral, is not to determine the border between the two but rather how in this very
metaphysico-political operation something like man as the norm and measurement of everything else is
proclaimed; without these intimate caesuras, or surgical interventions, the very decision of what is
human would probably not be possible, nor the animal could be thinkable. Consequently, man is the
result from the incongruity that ceaseless divisions and caesuras produce: the political mystery of
separation. Needless to say, the praxis of separation in Agamben’s account is simultaneously
hierarchical and oppositional: the reformulation of every question concerning ‘what something is’ as a
question concerning ‘through what something belongs to another thing’, immediately installs a
dialectical divide: ‘separated from the whole’ (hierarchy) and ‘separated because does not qualify as part
of that whole’ (opposition). Agamben calls this figuration the anthropological machine; an optical
device designed to produce the recognition of man as the norm by virtue of a series of mirrors in
which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of the
Other/animal/woman/mineral (Agamben; 2004).

Agamben considers that oppositional thought is problematic as it functions by means of an exclusion

which is also already a capturing and an inclusion which is also already an exclusion; a double spiral that
produces a zone of indeterminacy where the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside, and the
inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside. In other words, the anthropological machine feeds
from the creation of the nonhuman (e.g. animals and mineral forms), and the inhuman (e.g. the jew,
slaves, women). What lies at the heart of each of these figurations is a missing link which is always
lacking because it is already virtually present. Like every space of exception, adds Agamben, this zone
is, in truth, perfectly empty and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a
ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and
displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life or a human life, but
only a life that is separated and excluded from itself, only a bare life (Agamben; 1998; 2006).

****
The mechanism previously described is in itself cannibalising and self-mutilating: Self-and-Other are
devoid of prepositional content, they refer to a form of relationality of systematic dialectic
estrangement that requires the extermination of the excess that cannot be metabolised. The crisis we
are living today is only the realisation that the proclamation of the Self structurally relies on the
inexhaustibility of the taxonomical material it dispossess, as this proceeds, the distinctions that
separate any categorical pair collapse upon each other, producing a zone of indeterminacy that fades
away the lines between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic, and in its place
something appears for which we seem to lack words to describe. Perhaps, says Agamben,
concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme and monstrous
attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very
possibility of the distinction to its ruin (Agamben; 1998; 2006). So since Agamben advocates for a
political landscape that is not longer founded in the exclusion of bare life, I would like to proceed to
review the possible solutions that he offers us to assertively address this crisis without creating a new
killing engine.

A good point of departure would be to clarify that Agamben is not concerned with ‘burning down’ the
anthropological machine. To my judgment he wants to deactivate it, so the key term here is
inoperativeness or Desoeuvrement, as the only possible way to avoid reabsorption by a dialectic
historical progress. According to Durantaye, Agamben takes the notion of inoperativeness or
desoeuvrement from Bataille, which he refers not only to a refusal to do the work of a coercive society,
but also to vindicate for an ontological reflection on the modalities of being. Inoperativeness thus
represents something not exhausted but inexhaustible because it does not pass from the possible to the
actual; what the term inoperative stresses is the other side of potentiality; the realisation that a thing
might not come to pass, and by not doing so, it expresses the possibility of not actualising itself. Hence,
only a potentiality -potenza- that is capable of both potentiality and impotence -impotenza- is then
supreme potentiality.

For me Agamben’s formulation of profound boredom, taken from Heidegger, helps me to make sense of
inoperativeness’ political pertinence to bring the Self/Other divide to another perceptual dimension of
experience. Profound boredom is a different way of being held hostage in our relationality: we are
taken (hingenommen) by things, if not altogether lost in them, and often even captivated (benommen)
by them, in boredom we suddenly find ourselves abandoned in emptiness. But in this emptiness,
things are not simply carried away from us or annihilated; they are there, but they have nothing to
offer us; they leave us completely indifferent, yet in such a way that we cannot free ourselves from
them, because we are riveted and delivered over to what bore us: we are precisely still held fast by that
which is boring, we do not yet let it go, or we are compelled by it, bound to it for whatever reason. In
being left empty by profound boredom, something vibrates like an echo of that “essential disruption”
that arises in the animal from its being exposed and taken in an “other” that is, however, never revealed
to it as such (Agamben; 2006). So what is at stake here is that things are simply there, and once one
resist the temptation of taking the surgical knife to cut things off to open them, another realm of
experience emerges; a place where one is in the capacity to simply ‘accept’ things and entities as
whatever such -I’ll come back to this concept later in this section-, a place that offers us somewhere
beyond the subterranean and lethal streams of western dialectics.

Accordingly, Agamben emphasises on what Heidegger refers as being-held-in-suspense, one of the

structural moments of profound boredom which I interpret as a realm of ‘consciousness’ that grants
access to a particular sensibility, perhaps a prelinguistic affective moment in which the very
deactivation-of-possibility unveils the very origin of potentiality and with it, of Dasein, the being which
exists in the form of potentiality-for-being. To lie inactive unveils the power of impotentiality, the
potential-not-to, as the constitutively basis of originary possibilitization. Here Agamben traces the
genealogy of ‘brache’ which means, ‘fallow ground’, that is, the field that is left unworked in order to be
planted the following year. Being-held-in-suspense, that is, the deactivation of concrete possibilities is
an arrangement that exposes the inner logics of what generally makes pure possibility possible: the
deactivation of the concrete possibilities. To be-able-to comes from a being-able-no-to, that is, from a
deactivation of single, specific, tactical possibilities (Agamben; 2006). So in Agamben’s account, the
open is essentially the openness to a closedness, and whoever looks in the open sees only a closing,
only a not-seeing. Dasein simply informs an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened
from its own captivation to transit to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own
being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human.
Once said this, Agamben takes Benjamin’s idea of ‘the saved night’ to contemplate the possibility
towards a dialectic at a standstill; he refers to a kind of nature that has been given back to itself: it goes
beyond what has been lost and must be found or as something forgotten that must be remembered,
quite the contrary it refers to the lost and the forgotten as such, that is, something that is located
somewhere beyond the quest of salvation, that is unsaveable; what matters here is the in-between, the
interval or the play between the categorical pairs, their immediate constellation in a non-coincicende:
stars, like ideas, shine in the night of nature not in order to reveal it, nor to open it to human language,
but rather to give it back to its closedness and muteness. This relationship with nature holds the promise
of idling dualisms; the anthropological machine would no longer articulate nature and man in order to
produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. The machine is stopped, ‘at a
standstill’ and, in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no
name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in
the mastered relation, in the saved night (Agamben; 2006). In other words, the saved night refers to an
understanding of the world and all its inhabitants as fundamentally unsaveable or irreparable. That is
to say that we therefore do not need a politics to change, shape, and control the world around us so we
are finally free from enacting our sense of mastery in relationship to the world that surrounds us.
From this perspective, a dialectic at standstill means to acknowledge the distinctions between the
human and the animal, but these differences do no longer require the creation of a machine that
produces these differences and enforce them in inclusive-exclusive terms.

Durantaye notes that Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality attempts to downgrade men from its
position of omnipresence: mankind has no millennial or messianic task to complete, no divinely
ordained work that it must do, and no set function it must exercise (Durantaye; 2009). However this
does not mean that Agamben is offering an apology for apathy, pessimism, or indifference, quite the
opposite, he proposes us to surrender to the charms of whatever such, that is, an original relation to
desire. For Agamben, ‘whatever’ does not entail indifference; he inverts its original meaning from
‘being, it does not matter which’ to ‘being, which that it always matters’ so singularity is freed from the
false dilemma that obliges us to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility
of the universal (Agamben, 1993). In other words, to be ‘stranded’ at the crossroads of two dialectical
pairs, without privileging or ‘activating’ any of these, nurtures potentiality and gives us access to
unknowable worlds, worlds that cannot be known in terms of accuracy of truth, that disrupt our own
position and that reminds us that we are helplessly and intimately connected in intricate ways.

In The Open: Animal and Man (2006), Agamben gives a beautiful example of dialectics at standstill; he
praises the imaginative efforts of Jakob von Uexkull, a biologist from the XIX century that fiercely
opposed against taxonomy as a new emergent science. He believed that the views of classical taxonomy
aimed to build a single world view in which all living species are hierarchically ordered from the most
elementary form up to the higher organisms. Instead Uexkull supposes an infinite variety of perceptual
worlds, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, they are all equally perfect and
linked together as if in a gigantic musical score. What perhaps fascinates Agamben is Uexkull’s
imaginative and creative efforts to abandon anthropocentric views from the life sciences and the
radical dehumanisation of the image of nature, in other words, the emancipatory character of ‘the
Other’ by bringing difference as an affirmative force. He calls his reconstructions of the environments
‘excursions of unknowable worlds’, worlds that cannot be known in terms of accuracy or truth but
rather by exhausting how ‘the Other’ unfolds via our active imagination. For Uexkull there is no such
thing as a single world in which all living beings are situated, neither a space and a time that are equal
for all living and non living creatures: ‘the fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to
us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they
share with us—or with each other—the same time and the same space’. In a sense, for many non/living
creatures the presence of the human leaves them completely indifferent; they are not dialectically
attached to the imperial narcissistic Self, but rather they belong to a cosmic entanglement in which
man is no master.
Uexkull establishes a fundamental distinction to move forward his reconstructions, he distinguishes
the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the
environment-world that is constituted by a broad series of elements, carriers of significance or marks
which are the only thing that interests the non/animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt,
therefore our perceptual universe does not have any particular privilege; what I personally find
beautiful about the sentence ‘the Umgebung is our own Umwelt’ is how the ‘our’ is radically being called
into question, since each of ‘us’ occupies a temporal-spacial position in the world which is
fundamentally different from that of the others and even from our future-and-past-selves: ‘there does
not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-
the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-
the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way’. Notwithstanding,
regardless our differing Umwelts we are helplessly and intimately connected in intricate ways that
requires an even more exhausting imaginative investment to fully ever dimension, perhaps the art of
myth making that would reveal becoming-ridden truths, far from the dissection kits of western
metaphysics.

II. Buttler:
Breaking the Self/Other Divide:
Mourning as a Threshold for Transsubjectivation
Butler’s takes as a point of departure Agamben’s inclusive exclusive mechanism, and
focus particular attention to the production of taxonomical waste in the context of
the 9/11 aftermath. She denounces the normative schemes of intelligibility and
representationalism as the underlying force behind the Self/Other divide since these
framing devices determine what counts as real, which lives are real and how might
reality be remade. On this respect Butler’s figuration of dialectical otherness is what
she calls the forever spectrals, ghostly incarnations that have a strange way of
remaining animated as they have already suffered the violence of derealisation, so
any other form of violence that follows would fail to injure them since those lives had
been already negated. They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost
or, rather, never ‘were’, and the must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly,
in this state of deadness. So violence renews itself in the face of the apparent
inexhaustibility of its object. In an attempt to break this vicious circle Butler
introduces Levina’s figuration of the Face, which dislocate any attempt of successful
representation and brings us back to the precariousness of life itself, that is its
unintelligibility. She takes as a point of departure the body’s capacity to be injured as
a catalyst that facilitates the transit to the unknown and the unexpected, that is,
agreeing to undergo a transformation to which no outcome could be fully fathom. As
the body stretches its boundaries, the line that divides Self/Other falls, being the very
wound inflicted in the narcissistic Self the threshold to transsubjectivation, through
which one is in the capacity to recognise the Other as a constitutive part of the Self
and embrace it on its difference.

Butler’s latest work -e.g. Precarious Lives (2006) and Dispossessions: the Performative in the Political
(2014)- resonate with Agamben’s critique to western metaphysical apparatuses, that is, the production
of never-ending dialectical waste and taxonomical disposable material. Buttler is preoccupied with the
aftermath of 9/11 and the increasing obsession within the U.S political arena to exacerbate the
production of an excess, that must be wiped out, and by doing so, it perpetuates a violence that cannot
be waned by the inexhaustibility of its object. Whereas Agamben stresses on the production of
caesuras and cuts by means of an inclusive exclusion, Buttler, instead, denounces the normative
schemes of intelligibility as the underlying force behind the Self/Other divide. Put differently, once the
face of the human-as-the-norm has been shaped, the parade of inhumans, nonhumans and other
ghostly incarnations will follow without being invoked. Butler tries to debunk the misleading
assumption that those who gain representation, specifically self-representation have a better chance of
being treated as less than human or not regarded at all (Buttler; 2006). Instead, she focuses on
criticising the device of representationalism in itself as it is embedded in a dialectical kernel that forces
the establishment of who will and who not be dispossessed regardless of the prepositional content;
when intelligibility is successful, the anthropological machine is set in motion, in other words the
amputating powers of normativity are unleashed either by producing ideals of the in/human via des/
humanising images or by not providing image at all, no name, no narrative, so that there never was a
life, and there never was a death.

Under this circumstances, Buttler continues, framing devices will always fails us when they succeed, and
success here means the violence of derealisation, which is prior to any other form of violence that
follows. Derealisation takes place neither inside nor outside discourse, but through the very framing by
which discourse is contained. In other words, the quest behind intelligibility is the affirmation, and
subsequently negation, of what is real, whose lives are real and how might reality be remade. Those
who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealisation. So if violence is done
against those who are unreal, then, asks Buttler, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or
negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining
animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always
already lost or, rather, never "were," and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in
this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.
The derealisation of the "Other" means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral
(Buttler; 2006). The spectral is Butler’s personal figuration of otherness; it is what plunges into the
swampy terrains of oppositional thought but also soars to reminds us that under today’s conditions no-
one is left untouched; the fracture that separates Self/Other paradoxically is what also brings them
together but, quite contrary to Agamben, Butler considers that the porosity of this boundary can also
be the source for the recognition of our mutual interdependency.

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Butler invites us to pay close attention to those precious and painful moments in which the Self is
temporary dislocated of its privileged speaking position by those who the ‘I’ seeks to negate. First and
foremost, she encourages us to remain attentive to the wound inflicted on the narcissistic Self since it
would desperately struggle to perpetuate the fantasy of mastery, omnipresence and self-sufficiency by
denying the very conditions of its physical vulnerability. If we succeed in this endeavour then,
injurability -and process of mourning that follows-, can become a threshold for transsubjectivity; an
experience that lays beyond the categorical pair Self/Other and that has the potential to be the ground
of a new political community.

As Butler advances her argument, she reminds us that despite of our differences in location and history
it is possible to appeal to a ‘human’ shared condition; we all have some notion of what it is to have lost
somebody, so whether we like it or not, we have to come to terms with the fact that loss has made a
tenuous ‘we’ of us all. And if we have lost, Butler proceeds, then it follows that we have desired and
loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire (Buttler; 2006). Butler notes that ever
since psychoanalysis, the notion of ‘loss’ has been haunted by the phantom of nostalgia and
melancholia, henceforth ‘loss’ must be liberated from such claustrophobic confinement. Pain is more
than unnecessary suffering, the kind one can do without: mourning has the potentiality to disrupt the
well-defined contours of the body Self, since the ‘I’-who-mourns conveys to undergo a transformation
without a thelos, that is, a cruise to the realm of the unknown in which no outcome could be fully
fathom. The way that Buttler undoes the Self/Other divide holds such beautiful poetic value that, after
struggling for hours to articulate it in my own words, I have surrendered and let the reader engage
with the original material:

“Once we mourn, one is hit by waves, one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and
finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why.
 Something is larger than one's own deliberate plan, one's own project, one's own knowing and
choosing. For once, we are not masters of ourselves. (…) Perhaps in those moments,
something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others,
that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if
an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the
attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions,
then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you?
When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or
what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as
well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready
vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be
conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.”

As Butler beautifully writes, the wounded Self is displaced by the very relationships that holds it to
others, anonymous others that, although located far from the boundaries of the Self, supports its
gravity. One cannot simply conceive the Self as autonomous and in control anymore. The ‘I’ is called
into question by its relation to the Other; the ‘I’ is on hold, suspended, transported beyond-and-beside
the Self by disorienting forces, and despite of our bests efforts to remain intact, Buttler continues, one is
undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the
memory of the feel. And so, when we speak from a location as we do and as we must, we nevertheless
mean something complicated that is partially concealed by our usage. Every meaningful attribute of
our flesh; our race, our sexuality, our gender, is not precisely a possession, but rather, a mode of being
dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another1 . All in all, the Self is the result of
enigmatic traces of others who live on the fiber of the boundary that contains the Self; the Other here
is what has been gained by the disorientation produced by loss, a wound inflicted on the Self.
Accordingly, to loss a cherished being exposes our own foreignness to ourselves (Buttler; 2006).

Following the critique of reason and the metaphysical apparatuses that have confined otherness as a
site of devaluation and negativity, Buttler seeks to contest these formulations by nurturing the Other
and rehabilitating the fracture that rationality and western thought have created between Self and
Other. Pain, and the grief that follows, is a wonderful point of departure to show the arbitrariness of
such divide, however Butler is quite aware that mourning is not the end destination so she urges to
dislocate normative schemes of thought to bring back otherness from its spectrality. It is worth noting
that Buttler practices a healthy doses of skepticism towards new anti-humanist positions that have
emerged at the core of contemporary philosophical debates. So before abandoning humanism she
prompts us to re-imagine and recreate the human via the precariousness of life itself, that is, to move
closer to the Other, the ones who has payed the price of cannibalistic humanism in its very skin
(Buttler; 2006).

To pursue this endeavour Buttler introduces us to Levina’s formulation of “the face”; which confronts
us with some few paradoxes about what is at stake when we speak about the human in the most
humanist sense; it is a face that is not an actual face, nor exclusively human but that communicates
what is human, what is precarious, what is injurable. As I understand it, the face is a prelinguistic
affective ethical demand that uses language to communicate its own linguistic failure to formulate
ethical imperatives (Butler; 2006). According to Buttler the face operates as a catachresis, that is, as a
series of displacements of discreet “living” matter, such as legs, fingers, hands that are said to cry, to sob
and to scream, as if they were faces, but faulty ones, deprived of mouths, throats or brains to make
coherent speech possible. In other words, agonising vocalisations, materialisations that cannot be
named, nor make themselves intelligible, whom nonetheless addresses you/me/us, via utterances that

1 Th is paragraph is an adaptatio n of thre e quote s fro m Butle r ’s book Precarious Lives, w hich have been adapted so they
w ould m ake sense in a single sentence.
are not, strictly speaking, linguistic; “the face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for
which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its
sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic
sense”, all in all, the failed desire for realisation/materialisation, which paradoxically succeeds to realise/
materialise because it fails; that is, pure desire (Buttler; 2006).

As I mention at the beginning of this section, she directs her critique to representationalism and
normative schemes of intelligibility, so she introduces the face as a figuration that seeks to overcome
the production of never-ending dialectical waste and taxonomical disposable material. Therefore,
whatever stands for ‘human’, writes Buttler invoking Levinas, is not represented by the face: the human
is indirectly affirmed in the very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this
disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human,
then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure; there is something unrepresentable
that the face nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we
give. The human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identified with the
unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is
not "effaced" in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility. Butler, reminds
us that the face produces improper comparisons, e.g. the elbow that sobs, the faces can stand for those
sounds precisely because it is not the sound, therefore, the figurations underscores the
incommensurability of the face with whatever it represents. Issue that leads us to the fascinating
discovery that the face does not represent anything, in the sense that it always already fails to capture
and deliver that to which it refers.

The face never goes accompanied by a conjugation, from the face does not follow a verb: the face is not
the extreme precariousness of the other; the face is simultaneously ahead and behind “being”, in fact, in
Levina’s terms, humanity is a rupture of being, hence to respond to the face, to understand its meaning,
means to be awake to what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life itself.
However, Buttler warns us, that this cannot be an “awakeness” to one’s own life, and then an
extrapolation from an understanding of one’s own precariousness to an understanding of another’s
precariousness. On the contrary the face communicates struggle, it does not come from the peaceful
place of oedipal identification, but rather from the dangerous dance between two impulses at war: the
fear for one’s own survival, and the anxiety about hurting the Other. This is the struggle at the heart of
ethics, nonviolence emerges from the constant tension between both, the fear of undergoing, and of,
inflicting violence (Butler; 2006).

In a sense Butler’s project is committed to find forms of non-oedipal identification, in other words, she
questions fixed identities that aim to relate with those embodiments that the narcissistic Self authorises
and necessitates for proclaiming its own sense of mastery, independency and phallogocentric non-
corporality. On the contrary she incites us to explore forms of identification that always relies upon a
difference that it seeks to overcome, and that its aim is accomplished only by reintroducing the
difference it claims to have vanquished. All in all, the one with whom I identify is not me, and that ‘not
being me’ is the condition of identification, otherwise, identification collapses into identity -the other
being used as an optical device through which I see myself-. Paradoxically, this difference internal to
identification exposes how disidentification is part of the common practice of identification itself.
Therefore, as I mentioned before, the image Butler is searching for is the one that not only fail to
capture its referent, but show this failing. She hopes that this mechanism has the subversive potential
to liberate otherness from its ancient-old captivity without this being re-colonized by the Self: both Self
and Other must coexist in their differences and specificities by a subject that is permanent becoming,
always in transit.
 III. Halberstam:
Failing, Detouring:
Towards a Path of Becoming-Other
Halberstam focus his efforts in denouncing the ways science and high theory are
built upon normativity and disciplinary schemes based on endless repetitions and
the disqualification of forms of knowing and being-in-the world that detour from the
scientific norms. Halberstam takes these Other-knowledges, which are often depicted
as non-sensical, irrelevant, naive, undesirable, dumb, not synchronic and not
diachronic enough to qualify as valuable, and explores the enormous potential these
failed ways of knowing have to produce transformations to the configuration of the
Self that ignores the demands of the despotic father. Whether failure to comply to the
needs of phallogocentrism comes as a wilful choice or not, these ways of being-in-
the-world can become absolutely revolutionary as they open a portal that gives voice
to the Others and allows paths to the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and
the unremarkable: when we lose, we can imagine other goals for life, for love, for art,
and for being based in solidarity and new forms of kinship and bond-making. This
project involves the refusal of legibility; drama without a script; narrative without
progress. Halberstam believes in the potential of failure to express an active refusal of
the dominant logics of power and discipline, that is, as a form of critique that exploits
the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities. Ultimately this
project seeks to queering life, that is, find ways of being in the world for becoming
the Others that the despotic father seeks to negate, this immediately rehabilitates
otherness and liberates it from the place of negation, exclusion, absence and
confinement where it has always been.

Halberstam is one of the few authors I have included in this literature review that does not directly
engage on the dialectical pair Self/Other, however he addresses crucial issues regarding knowledge
production which are highly implicated on the renewal of this fracture by preventing alternative ways
of knowing from rising. Moreover since I am highly interested in authors committed with rethinking
thought and who courageously dare to propose innovative formulations that contest hierarchical,
oppositional and dualistic ways of being in the world, Halberstam could not be left behind, specially
because of his visionary, imaginative and refreshing spirit. I decided to introduce his reflections right
after Butler due to the fact that they both have identified intelligibility and normativity as the source of
reason’s disaster. To my knowledge The Queer Art of Failure (2011) is a book that has been severely
criticised in academic circles. Also, the reviews and commentaries about this work in Amazon were so
harsh that I could not resist the temptation to read it and, frankly speaking, I am glad I did; although I
have a love-hate relationship with it, the strength and vitality it introduces is remarkable and has
provided me with the strength and confidence to keep swimming in the rough and disorienting streams
of feminist philosophy.

Just like Agamben and Butler, Halberstam scrutinises western rationality, however through the axis of
scientific knowledge. He depicts most of scholarly work as highly normative; it systematises and
codifies ways of knowing and experiencing into acceptable and linear scientific norms. He reminds us
that in the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of
being have been discarded and disqualified, rendered nonsensical, nonconceptual or insufficiently
elaborated (Halberstam; 2011). Quoting Foucault, he reminds us that these ‘faulty’ knowledges are
often depicted as naive, hierarchically inferior and below the required levels of erudition and
‘scientificism’; as a matter of fact, terms such as serious and rigorous tend to be coded words, in
academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness and adequacy. From this perspective
normativity and reason establish a threatening pact that crowns intelligibility as the desirable
technique for sorting, organising, and for abstracting systems of knowledge; put differently, a dictator-
styled regime of orderliness, synchronicity and, linear causality is installed at the expense of
annihilating surprise and shock (Halberstam; 2011). Unfortunately, under these conditions, scientific
disciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish, and most
importantly, they statically reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent in order to maintain consistency.
Hence, as the crisis of reason sharpens, together with its fascinating contradictions, one must ask what
is the price we are willing to pay for reproducing the ancient old illusion of coherence. In other words,
since when taking a different route became an uninhabitable position?

Contrary to the dissecting scientific spirit, Halberstam encourage us to exercise the queer art of failure
since it exposes the traps and impasses of binary formulations while simultaneously exploring different
rewards. Accordingly, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms embedded in disciplined
behaviour, and although, it certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative effects such as
disappointment, disillusionment, despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects
to poke holes in the toxic blind-optimism of contemporary life (Halberstam; 2011). Furthermore,
losing one’s way also express a sort of commitment to rethink the project of learning and thinking
altogether, somewhere beyond unduly optimism and nihilistic critical dead ends. So to sink in the
territories of failure, its pleasures and pains, means to detour around ‘proper’ knowledge, to wander,
improvise, fall short, and move in circles; to lose one’s ways, one’s cars, one’s agenda, and possibly one’s
mind, but in losing one might also find another ways of making meaning based on cooperation and in
which no one gets left behind (Halberstam; 2011).

As Halberstam advances his argumentation, he stresses on the political urgency to build assemblages
of resistant technologies that include collectivity, imagination and a kind of situationist commitment to
surprise and shock; to reject the fantasy of elsewhere and to engage in-the-now. If there is something
fascinating about being a failure is that hardly ever someone will take you seriously, so you can enjoy
the perks of being cynical, frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. In fact, the desire to be taken
seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production;
the straight-one-way-street with few possibilities to detour. Although the prepositional content of
failure might take forms of negativity, in fact it hides an affirmative force: it might become a little ray of
sunshine that produces shadow and light in equal measure and knows that the meaning of the Self
always depends upon the meaning of the Other (Halberstam; 2011).

What personally attracts me from this project is its centripetal force of spinning out otherness and
difference from Hegelian dialectics; Halberstam sees otherness as a site of affirmative engagement and
solidarity: all the losers from patriarchy and capitalism; queer sexualities, races, genders and other
monstrosities who have failed to continue tradition, history and progress. The queer art of failure gives
voice to the Others and allows paths to the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the
unremarkable. We lose, and in losing we imagine other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.
This project involves the refusal of legibility; drama without a script; narrative without progress.
Halberstam believes in the potential of failure to express an active refusal of the dominant logics of
power and discipline, that is, as a form of critique that exploits the unpredictability of ideology and its
indeterminate qualities (Halberstam; 2011).

Instead of the sacred temples of western thought we need low theory, forms of knowledge based on
detours, twists, and turns that privileges knowing through confusion without seeking resolution, that
is, a way of knowing that strives not to explain but to involve. Low theory is not an end into itself but a
commitment to embark oneself in an ambulatory journey to ‘something else’; the unplanned, the
unexpected, the improvised, and the surprising. In Halberstam’s words: “I believe in low theory in
popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe
in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy,
bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims,
fancies” (Halberstam; 2011). I interpret Halberstam’s project through the lenses of Deleuze: queering
failure is a matter of becoming and this implies to a great extent to develop a special affinity towards
disloyalty; a faith in a world without a thelos and a huge investment in counterintuitive modes of
knowing.

Equally important in this project is to suspect memorialisation since memory is in itself a disciplinary
mechanism that aims at tiding up disorderly histories (of slavery, the holocaust, war, trauma, etc) by
selecting what is important so that events full of ruptures and contradictions can be handled in a
coherent or temporally logical sequences. It follows from this that forgetting becomes a way of resisting
the heroic and the grand logics of history, unleashing new forms of memory that relate more to
spectrality than hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription, to
fiction than to reality (Halberstam; 2011). In short, the failure to remember sabotages the Oedipal plot
which is grounded on the transmission of ideas and the faithfulness to stick to the law of the father.
Worth noting, de-linking the process of generation from the force of historical progress a concern that
has been in the queer agenda since decades: queer lives seek to uncouple change from the supposedly
organic and immutable forms of family and inheritance that soils along heterosexual life narratives.

In lieu, Halberstam insists that we may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in
order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a
place for the new, but where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts.
The contingency of queer relations, their uncertainty, irregularity, and even perversity, disregards the
so-called natural bonds between memory and futurity, and in the process make an implicit argument
for forgetfulness, albeit one that is rarely reflected in mainstream texts about memory and forgetting,
where new forms or relating, belonging, and caring can flourish (Halberstam; 2011). Not surprisingly
the the situationist movement as a radical action and revolutionary movement understood themselves
to be ‘partisan of forgetting’ so the present would unfold in unprecedented ways.

Finally, the way that Halberstam revisits the notion of memory and forgetfulness is fundamental to
carry on substantial transformations on the very conditions of otherness; for some people, memories
can be absolutely unbearable, for it actively and passively keeps alive the experience of events that one
may do better to blot out. Many survivors and dispossessed people often engage in radical and/or
wilful forgetting as a way to carry on. Whereas learning in fact is part memorisation and part
forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure, forgetting is not simply a pragmatic strategy to open up
more space for new things; it is also a gate-keeping mechanism, a threshold that allows to engage in the
present in a brand new fashion, bringing new ways of relating with the world, at least for a moment.

VI. Braidotti:
The Powers of Pain and Desire:
Becoming the Other(s)
Rossi Braidotti’s point of departure is, as most of the scholars previously reviewed,
the crisis of reason and its discontents. Against many postmodern authors who
express feelings of melancholia and nostalgia after all the certainties of the cartesian
subject have been shattered, she asserts that this historical moment could not be
more convenient for the liberation of those who have been thrown at the margins of
the image of the Self; the dialectically oppressed Others, whose silence presence
install the european white ‘vitruvian man’ as the point of reference for all human and
nonhuman forces. Taking from french feminist post-structuralism, Braidotti insist on
the urgency to assert sexual difference and resist the assimilation of the feminine into
the masculine norm, namely phallogocentrism and the empire of death white men
philosophers. She considers the feminine as a peripheral figure endowed with the
capacity to make machine-like connections and enfleshed non-teleological
 becomings that expresses a pure notion of desire for permanent and nomadic
transformations, in other words, she attempts to free desire from the ghost of lack
and loss and the phallic signifier in a very Deleuzean spirit. Also she takes from
Spinoza’s vitalist philosophy and develops a methodology for stretching the
boundaries of the body and its capacity to endure metamorphoses which can be
painful at times. In the threshold that Braidotti proposes, immanence and
transcendence are forces that coexist so Irigaray’s idea of the sensible transcendental
is crucial in her project as well as mimicry, that is the careful investment to revisit the
location of woman as absence and lack. By doing so, she seeks to transform otherness
and difference as a self standing category, a location without strings attached, phallic
signifiers and dialectical ties.
****

The work of Rossi Braidotti occupies a very special place in my heart and my MA research project. She
is a very dear scholar to me with whom I have developed a very intense and passionated relationship in
the lasts couple of months. Although quite frustrating and disorienting at times, as she recognises
herself, her writings are pure acts of feminist disloyalty; ‘explosive bombs of enthusiasm’; highly
provocative and absolutely necessary in times of profound nostalgia and postmodernist delusion. I
have decided to conjure up Braidotti at this point of my literature review following Halberstam spirit: I
interpret her intellectual project as a power converter, a deep expanding network, a contact-making
machine driven by desire; a tumbleweed that mingles with relative ease at the pace of different tunes,
creating both, tension and distention, in a quite fluid manner. As she has stated in some of her books,
Nomadic Subjects (1994) or Metamorphoses (2002) for instance, criticism is a matter of affinity, a
creative gesture; texts are not there to be interpreted, but rather to be assimilated, consummated, used
or not as one pleases. Heavily intoxicated by Spinozist vitalism, Braidotti acts as a plasmatic cosmic
glue: an electrically ‘neutral’ medium of unbound positive and negative particles that has the capacity
to be affected and rearranged in close proximity to whatever and whoever it encounters.

*****
In agreement with Agamben, Braidotti points out how western thought has always functioned by
dualistic oppositions, which create subcategories of otherness, or “difference-from.” Hence, difference
has been predicated on relations of domination and exclusion where to be ‘different-from’ has become
a sign of inferiority, making entire categories of beings into disposable matter. Facism as a political
project, for instance, defined difference in terms of biological determinism and proceeded to
exterminate large numbers of human beings who were constructed as pejorative otherness. However,
unlike the authors previously reviewed Braidotti connects her criticism of Hegelian dialectics and
cartesian dualisms with the conflation of the masculine to represent the human. She straightforwardly
equates men with logos, namely phallogocentrism, a system that rests at the very center of western
thought and which confines the feminine to the status of devaluated ‘otherness’; pure immanence unfit
for transcendence, just like any other living or mineral entity that detours from the phallic norm.

Braidotti goes into the important task of disclosing the century old pact between philosophy and
masculinity, namely, phallogocentrism. In agreement with Halberstam, she considers philosophy as a
discipline of thought that maintains a privileged bond to domination, power, and violence, which
consequently requires mechanisms of exclusion as part of its standard practices. As Agamben has also
well noted, Braidotti insist that philosophy creates itself through what it excludes as much as through
what it asserts: high theory, posits its values through the exclusion of many nonmen, nonwhites,
nonlearned, who immediately become the sign of monstrosity, deviancy and abnormality; the bodily
incarnations of difference from the basic ‘human’ norm, the european white vitruvian man. From this
follows that, for instance, misogyny is not an unfortunate accident but rather a tightly constructed
system that captures difference and throws it at the shadow of the cartesian man. On this respect,
misogyny is not a hazard but rather the very structural necessity of a system that can only represent
"otherness" as negativity (Braidotti; 1993). Not surprisingly, under dialectical circumstances, the Other
of the Self is always meant to be doom. The subject, as we have always know it, is just a heap of
fragmented parts held together by the symbolic glue that is the attachment to, or identification with,
the phallogocentric symbolic reign. A heap of rabble, calling itself the center of creation; a knot of
desiring and trembling flesh, projecting itself to the height of an imperial consciousness. The tyrannic
illusion of unity, mastery and self-transparency: the eye that gazes from nowhere but sees it all
(Braidotti; 1993).

Braidotti notes that the crisis of modernity inaugurates the moment of history in which this universal
subject -the Self-, is called into question; however this Self is always already sexed: the masculine. The
ontological security that once the Cartesian subject enjoyed, shattered in the face of philosophy’s
incapacity to think about what sustains it as a form of thought. The holy halo of transparency and
neutrality that safeguarded rationality in the past, together with its universalistic aspirations, has been
‘poluted’. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, ‘the apocalyptic trinity of modernity’ as Braidotti calls them,
shared with us the ‘bad’ news that philosophical/rational modes of thought rest on a set of unspoken
premises that are themselves nonrational, prelinguistic and all-too-affective. As the ancient old fortress
that divided Self/Other has been brought to its ruins, modernity crowns a period of uncertainty and
chaos. The fall of the wall has left many dwellers of the third millennia groundless and in permanent
estrangement as they try to adjust in a world where the only constant is change. The economy of fear is
the ruling principle: the accident and the catastrophe awaits and nobody knows for sure where the
bullet shot that inflicts the fatal blow will come. There is not one enemy anymore, but the infinite
possibility of enemies everywhere: it could be the woman, the child the neighbour, the AIDS virus,
global warming or the next computer crash. So unless one likes complexity, one wont feel home in the
twenty-first century (Braidotti; 2002; 2014).

****

After reading three of Braidotti’s books and a couple of essays, for me has become clear that she has
grown frustrated with the pervasive nihilism and negativity that prevails today in postmodern
thought, partially because it produces fear towards change in times where transformations are
absolutely necessary if we ever want to work through the horrors our world worlds. In strict opposition
to contemporary feelings of helplessness and nostalgia that emerge from this wounded masculinity,
Braidotti sees in the crisis of modernity an enormous opportunity for woman and all the dialectically
oppressed Others to enter the sacred temples of western thought and vandalise them. If otherness has
always been defined as a form of absence whose existence legitimises the Self -as Agamben says-, then
the time has come to retake this location and detour from its original premises; to carefully invest
some time to patiently rework those concepts which have somehow failed us in the past. For instance,
subjectivity, identity, rationality, desire, so on and so forth. In other words, we should strive to till a
garden of different differences beyond the master-slave narrative via profound political acts of disloyalty
and joyful interaction with the ‘sacred’ texts.

First and foremost desire must be freed from the gosht of lack. Braidotti has mixed feelings towards
psychoanalysis: on one hand she recognises that it inflicts a fatal wound on the transcendental
narcissism of the Self, it also exposes how the Self is always exceeded by the forces it attempts to
govern. Strictly speaking, thought does not precede action, the subject’s drives and desires always detour
from the cartesian place of enunciation. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is bankrupted under the
psychoanalyst’s eyes. Respectively, the noncoincidence of the subject with his/her consciousness marks
an important paradigmatic and epistemological swift. However, on the other hand, Braidotti quarrels
against psychoanalysis fascist attitude, one that seeks to install a new tyrant: the omnipotence of a
symbolic system that indexes the subject on a scale of lack, linguistic signifiers and negativity: the
omnipresent phallus. Concerning this, Braidotti notes via Deleuze that the enormous potentiality of
the unconscious is recycled and re-subjugated in the name of the phallus and under the moral and
political supervision of a self-regulating, socially-enforced conscious and moral rationality. In other
words, according to Deleuze, psychoanalysis re-invests the affective foundations of the subject into a
libidinal economy dominated by the phallogocentric principle which equates consciousness with
control and the despotic domination of the 'dark continents within’ (Braidotti; 1993).

Put differently, psychoanalysis brings to light the secret forces and intensities that overflows the Self
only to attach them to a new symbolic system that organises these energies into an efficient social
economy. Organs and functions, desires and ‘proper’ objects are ‘joined’ into socially acceptable
assemblages. In psychoanalytical terms zones of pleasures have to be mapped in order to transform
these wild forces into digestible systems, facilitating the process of assimilation of the darker and less
desirable aspects of one’s libido. Not surprisingly, the process of attaching body parts to ‘adequate’
sensations simultaneously requires the elimination of Others as improper or abject, shaping the
contours between the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’: mouth-hunger-eat, breast-suck-swallow. All in
all, the body maps encoded by doctors and physicians are used for policing desire, which is one of the
prerequisites for gaining entry into the civilised world. In consequence the subject is forced through
sophisticated discursive apparatuses to give up the possibility of multiple encounters, wild bodily
motives, heightened sensory perception and unbridled sexual activity (Braidotti; 2002). Braidotti
compares Freud’s theory of drives with a luna-park, where specific types of fun are made available, at a
cost, at special times, in socially accepted ways, and usually scheduled during bank holidays. As a
result, this ‘fordist' understanding of desire produces forms of identification with the Phallus and also
affirms the power of linguistic signifiers built in a logic of absence.

Not surprisingly, Braidotti seeks to overthrow this perverse system by reconceptualising otherness and
subjectivity away from the pitfalls of the phallic regime. In order to carry on with the hardships of this
endeavour, she decides to come back -and ahead- a ‘pure’ notion of desire, one that operates outside
psychoanalysis’ libidinal economy and, do not comply with the traces of the linguistic signifier. On this
respect, she teams up with Deleuze to stretch the boundaries of desire, free from any teleological
ordainment and without strings attached. Both authors understand desire as a gratuitous force that
expresses the original predisposition of bodies to interconnect beyond the demands of historical
progress, that is, a capacity to make impersonal machine-like connections beyond the image of the
narcissistic self. This is a philosophy in which the body acts as a transformer of negative dialectical
forces into positive open-ended affects. Desire is the raw material that activates multiple
transformations; it throws us outside of ourselves, to the unfamiliar and the uncanny; the margins of
our body contours, the Other of the Self; the Other of the Other; the Other of the Other of the Other
of the Other. Becoming is perhaps the word that best describes this process of permanent mutation and
affinity towards the unruly, the cacophonous, and the disorderly (Braidotti; 1993; 2002; 2014).

Braidotti’s nomadism is an invitation to ‘hear the roar which lies on the other side of silence’ -as she calls
it, quoting George Eliot-, where the human-centred world view is shattered by other affects, types of
sensibility of the non-dominant kind, that is, to confront ourselves with the animal-other, the mineral-
other, the unrepresentable-other, the machine-other, the she/other, and learn to express their positive
strength, their glorious non-familiarity. Nomadism seeks to break away from the patterns of masculine
identification that high theory demands and the paralysing structures of an exclusive academic style,
so we can indulge ourselves in the art of disloyalty to civilisation. (Braidotti; 1993). As I mentioned in
the previous paragraph, the only principle that sustains the entire process of change, is the original
desire to become, the desire to say, the desire to speak, which must express itself in non-unitary, non-
linear, web-like, rhizomatic manner. This is of utter importance, Braidotti’s reformulation of desire has
the enormous potential to free otherness from the ghost of nostalgia and dialectical attachment: finally
the Other has the chance to cross the threshold of pejoration and rise from the catacombs of death
white men renewed, speaking from a self-standing subject location that is not necessarily diametrically
opposed to the Self, nor requires the oppression and exclusion of other Others to ground its presence.

Un/fortunately, the quest of freeing otherness from dialectics is not only milk and honey. Stretching
desire from the limits of the body -and the oedipalised self- requires more than good will:
transformations can be dreadful at times, they must be done carefully and in full awareness of the
fragility of our bodies, otherwise things can turn horribly wrong. Becoming is not an intrinsically
harmonious process, insofar as it involves inter-connections with other forces and consequently also
conflicts and clashes. Whether we like it or not, in-depth changes are at best demanding and at worst
painful, so we have to take pain into account as a major incentive for, and not only an obstacle to, an
ethics of change (Braidotti; 2006; 2014). In relation to this, Braidotti relies on Spinoza’s vitalist
philosophy because it offers a path towards endurance, an aptitude which is required to tolerate the less
‘charming’ sides that transformations unfold.

In The Posthuman (2014) Braidotti presents a genealogy of humanism, anthropocentrism and the anti-
humanist stream that followed. In this book she notes that Spinoza’s monistic philosophy, which
directly questioned Descartes’ famous mind-body distinction, was dismissed by Hegel and Marxist-
Hegelians who did not accept Spinoza’s idea of matter as one, driven by the desire of self-expression
and ontologically free, partially because this idea was seen as politically ineffective and holistic at heart.
This situation, Braidotti writes, changed in the 1970s in France, when a new wave of scholars
rehabilitated Spinozist monism precisely as an antidote to some of the contradictions of Marxism and
as a way of clarifying Hegel’s relationship to Marx. The main goal of these thinkers was to overcome
dialectical oppositions, engendering non-dialectical understandings of materialism itself as an
alternative to the Hegelian scheme. They took from Spinoza’s legacy to define matter as vital and self-
organising, which results in relocating difference outside the dialectical scheme, that is, as a complex
process of differing which is framed by both internal and external forces. This approach is known as
‘radical immanence’ or ‘vitalist materialism’ because it rejects all forms of transcendentalism and
metaphysical properties to matter (Braidotti; 2014).

According to Spinoza, matter is a resource with astonishing properties; it is intuitive, affective and
endowed with intelligence, but one that is no longer indexed upon a phallogocentric set of standards
based on Law and Lack, but rather unhinged. Matter is in love with motion and change, and often
refuses to comply with the self-glorifying image of a pretentious-egoistical-narcissistic-paranoid
consciousness. The mind seeks to fixate its imperial will upon forces that express their desire to flow
and connect, however Spinozist’ vitalism insist that these affects do not belong to the human, in fact
they simply are not meant to be owned, they are cosmic energy that flow in-between the cracks of
western dualisms. Most importantly, the human body, as a portion of matter, also has the property to
endure; to be affected to the point of pain and extreme pleasure indistinctively. Thence, endurance
aims at mapping out the limits of what the body can take, through encounters and mingling with
other entities, beings and forces. For Braidotti, ethics means faithfulness to this potentia, or the desire
to become and reach the threshold of sustainability, which is only possible via experimentation.

Putting it in different words, the Spinozist ethical subject is one that can last in time and bear the pain
of confronting the overwhelming forces of the cosmos, cracking up a bit but without having his/her
physical or affective intensity destroyed by it. Thus, Braidotti encourages us to cultivate our affinity
towards actualising sustainable forms of transformations and to find adequate assemblages or
interactions. Summing up, one has to pursue and actively create the kind of encounters that are likely
to favour an increase in active becomings and avoid those that diminish one’s potentia. This is an
intensive ethics, based on the shared capacity of humans to feel empathy for, develop affinity with and
hence enter in relation with other forces, entities, beings, waves of intensity (Braidotti; 2014).

In Metamorphosis (2002), for instance, Braidotti engages in a series of experimental writings in which
she explores different forms of non-oedipal temporal identifications; becoming-animal, becoming-
machine, becoming-insect, becoming-monstrous. She reminds us how these figurations have
historically been associated with masculine fears and anxieties towards the feminine, location that
expresses both fascination and horror, so she attempts to reimagine womanhood beyond the annexed
position of abject-Other. Needless to say, Braidotti’s becoming opposes the Majority/men: the
sedentary, guilt-ridden, life-denying, moralising tone of most Western philosophy; a dogmatic image
of thought which perpetuates itself with unerring regularity (Braidotti; 2002). As it has been stated at
the beginning of this section, Braidotti’s project stresses the political urgency to create alternative paths
of transformations that differ from the masculine place of enunciation, as a result, the way she
conceptualises becoming and desire carries the traces of sexual difference.

In the new world that Braidotti encourages us to imagine the feminine bears a privileged position by
being posited as eccentric vis-a-vis the dominant mode, or as constantly off-centre. The feminine marks
the threshold between the human and its ‘outside’: she is a machine-like connecting entity that lays at the
periphery: she mingles with the animal, the vegetable, the mineral and also the divine. Women’s
inbetweenness brings the sacred and the abject to the same feast (Braidotti; 2002). The feminine
happens ‘in transit’, moving on, passing through, creating connections where things were previously
disconnected or seemed unrelated, where there seemed to be ‘nothing to see’. Accordingly, these acts of
displacement and rhizomatic encounters also imply the effort to move on to the invention of new ways
of relating, of building new thresholds of experience, love, empathy and affinity towards the Other(s).

I cannot stress enough how crucial is Braidotti’s defence of sexual difference in the furtherance of her
philosophy. She faces the challenge of envisioning female subjectivity in times where certainties of
gender dualism have collapsed and many feminist and continental philosophers are celebrating the
arrival of a new post-gender world. Braidotti’s attempts to bring back woman at the core of any debate
concerning the crisis of modernity has been target of severe criticism: she has been accused of being
essentializing, naive and unassertive by male philosophers and sex/gender feminists alike. However,
being trained within french feminist post-structuralism she asserts that sexual difference rest on the
idea that self-determination is the first step of any program of deconstruction, since we, women, have not
had the possibility to define ourselves in our own terms. Subsequently there is something wicked with
deconstructing a subjectivity one has never controlled nor possessed. History painfully reminds us that
women’s silent presence erects the foundational stone upon which the master in his monologic mode
rests; we have borne both materially and symbolically the costs of the masculine privilege of
autonomous self-definition, in other words, we have been dispossessed of a place from whence to
speak. Hence a theory of difference that fails to take into account sexual difference leaves Braidotti as a
feminist critic in a state of skeptical perplexity (Braidotti; 1993).

Just to briefly summarise this point: one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully
granted; one cannot diffuse a sexuality that has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In
order to announce the death of the subject -as many seem to proclaim these days- one must first have
gained the right to speak as one. All in all, we have to embrace that tiny little corner we, women, have
been thrown out to move forward and be able to speak from a location. True substantial changes are
engendered by revisiting and burning up the old, like the totemic meal in Freud, one must assimilate
the dead before one can move onto a new order. The quest for points of exit requires the mimetic
repetition and consumption of the old regime: she asserts that we must resist masculine assimilation
and oedipal identification with the phallus, that is, to temporary suspend the post gender fantasy and
its promises: women must inhabit and speak the feminine, we must think it, write it, represent it in our
own terms, that is to express the desire to connect and create affinity towards the Other of the Same
(Braidotti; 1993). In other words, the assertion of sexual difference challenges the century old
identification of the thinking subject with the universal and the masculine. What is at stake here is the
feminist critique of rationality by exposing men’s complicity with reason and systems of exclusion/
domination. So before feminists relinquish the signifier woman in favour of the new androgyny we
need to repossess it and to revisit its multifaceted complexities.

Therefore the challenge behind Braidotti’s project is how to free otherness from the subjugated position
of annexed “other” of the Self, so as to make this location expressive of a different difference, of pure
difference, of an entirely new plane of becoming, out of which differences can multiply, differ from each
other (Braidotti; 1993). On this respect I find Braidotti’s take on Irigaray’s sensible transcendental
profoundly powerful. For Irigaray the sensible transcendental situates the female embodied subject in a
space between transcendence and immanence, a location that allows the subject to connect to a
number of differences within herself and also nurtures the threshold between herself and others in
non-dialectical non-oppositional manner. Our motto must be: no bodily materialism without
transcendence! No female embodied subject without incorporeality! This form of strategic essentialism
seeks to dwell right at the heart of the inmanence/trascendence western paradox: neither the full
presence of experience, nor the radical anteriority of a transcendental condition. As Deleuze suggests,
nothing happens at the center, everything occurs at the periphery, in the borderlands where a a kind of
open-ended availability to Others is possible and where the ability to approach any Other in full
respect of his/her living singularity can flow respecting the presence and the boundaries, while moving
and being moved by an other toward the recognition of our respective and irreducible differences
(Braidotti; 2002)

All in all, the notions of embodiment and immanence posit one energetic, forever-shifting entity,
fundamentally driven by desire for expansion towards its many-faceted exterior border/others. It is
outward-directed and forward-looking, not indexed on the past of a memory dominated by
phallogocentric self-referentiality. Intensive, affective, external resonances make desire into a force that
propels forward, but also always remains in front of us, as a dynamic, shifting horizon of multiple
other encounters, of territorial and border crossings of all kinds. As painful as it might sound we need
creativity enhancing experiences that allows us, woman, to embrace our own enfleshed self, working
through the claustrophobic confinement of this location. The question is, can we dream with a form of
selfhood in a non-self-aggrandising narcissistic mode? The answer that Braidotti gives us is: yes, but
only by transiting in in-between spaces, cultivating the art of transversality and discontinuous
mutation, giving priority to those passages that has been forbidden to us by the phallogocentric
regime; the maniacal sleepless eye of reason brooding over its empire of self-reflection and obsessional
neurosis.

V. Karen Barad:
Troubling the Self:
Touching and Sensing the Others Within.
Barad’s project elaborates a pathbreaking post-humanist performative understanding
of matter that seeks to work-through the very quandaries of western metaphysics,
representationalism and Cartesian dualisms. By doing so she engages in a fascinating
re-elaboration of Butler’s work on performativity, Foucault’s account on discourse,
Bohr’s quantum physics and, Haraway’s critique of reflexivity -among many others-
since they share her interest of finding ways to account for processes of
differentiation, boundary de/formation and the mechanisms of exclusion inherent to
mattering, as well as issues of ethics and responsibility. She quarrels with ideas of the
world as composed of discreetly separated ‘things’ with well-settled boundaries that
precede -or pre-exist- the ongoing dynamism of the world in its iterative becoming,
as this reproduces ancient old fantasies of disembodiment and individual self-
sufficiency. On this respect she proposes diffraction as opposed to reflection, since it
is grounded in a firm commitment of taking difference and differing as a source of
transformation without creating anxieties about copy and original. In this sense
Barad seeks to move from cartesian cuts to agential separability, being the later a way
to enact a local resolution within a particular phenomena without presuming an
immovable divide; this means, cutting things together-apart as one movement and
being response-able for what’s on ‘either side’ of the cut, rather than amputating and
discarding what has been excluded. Needless to say agential cuts entail an ethical call
to respond to the Self/Other dichotomy which Barad strives to rehabilitate. To do so
she does an enthralling reading to the sense of touch, that is, entering in contact with
one’s own alterity to shake the very foundations of the Self.
Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) is one of the most challenging books I have ever read so far.
Personally I think it demands a particular desire to stretch one’s own endurance and also to develop a
queer pleasure towards being massively confused. Barad’s work engages in a diffractive reading of
different intra-disciplinary sources; continental philosophy, feminist and queer theory, poetry, techno-
science and quantum physics, and expresses her personal commitment to ground a post-humanist
understanding of ethics and relationality beyond, but also carefully working-through, metaphysics and
representationalism, which carry the traces of essentialist world views concerning matter and nature,
including the ‘house of mirrors’ it produces. Once said this, I could not avoid noticing that what makes
particularly challenging -but also rewarding- reading Barad is her keen interest on thinking in terms of
processes rather than concepts, lending Braidotti’s expression. This aspect fuels her work with a
beautiful dynamism loyal to her agential-realist onto-ethic-epistemology of the never-ending and non-
teleological -but yet agential- rearrangement of matter/boundaries/time/space in its permanent
worlding.

Barad, who does not conceive the world as separated objects with well-define boundaries with
preceding and determinate properties, also ‘participates’, or using her neologism, intra-acts in the
inexhaustible dynamism of matter’s iterative becoming by actualising ‘classical’ concepts that traverse
many contemporary academic disciplines such as phenomena, apparatus, performativity, objectivity,
ethics, accountability and justice, just to mention a few. Also, she ‘discards’ -or rather, reworks- some
and proposes ‘new’ ones: intra-action instead of interaction; being-of-the-world instead of being-in-the-
world; intra-action instead of interaction, as they carry the traces of an essentialist philosophy that
assumes the existence of individual things that pre-exist the relationship that holds them. Instead she
advocates for traces of matter that emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.
Noteworthy, Barad also quarrel against ideas of matter, temporality and space if they exist in self-
standing containers or surfaces awaiting for signification, since this misconception often blurs our
capacity to imagine time-space-matter as part of a complex liaison that propels us towards changes and
transformations.

In this short introduction I have stressed on the dynamic and process-oriented aspect of Barad’s onto-
ethic-epistemology because this posits a very concrete challenge to anyone who attempts to work-
through her: all her concepts are delicately entangled, in such way that they do not stand, nor function,
individually outside of the relationship that holds them. I consider this a beautiful provocation to think
and write diffractively. Also, although her philosophy is robust, it entails a passionate yearning to
recognise its fragility; it requires certain sensibility and predisposition to handle ‘things’ with care, or
as she would put it herself, ‘to pay close attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world
and ‘my’ very being, all being’ (Barad; 2012e), in other words, being attentive to the diffraction patterns
and differences that flare up when agentially separated ‘bodies’ intra-act. So no cannibalistic surgical
knife will do this time. What’s at the heart of Barad’s project is a very important move from the old
worn-out cartesian cuts to agential separability, this of course, nurtures my enfleshed desire, or my
radical openness, to work-through the very quandaries of the Self/Other divide. Once said this, the
following pages will engage with Barad’s mayor formulations with a keen emphasise on her
understanding of processes of differentiation, boundary making and matter formation/exclusion,
needless to say, inquiries about ethics transversally crosses all these realms, nonetheless, in the last
section I will combine her concerns about alterity with her most recent elaborations of responsibility
and accountability. Central to this is Barad’s interest on rehabilitating the sense of touch as an integral
part for revisiting the ground upon which Self-and-Other stand.

*****

First and foremost, Barad’s agential realism is a beautiful and thoughtful project that engages and
works-through the very quandaries of western metaphysics, representationalism and cartesian thought
without giving in to the despair of nihilism or the sticky web of relativism (Barad; 2003), so from the
very beginning we can see important resonances with the rest of the authors included in this literature
review. At the heart of Barad’s work is her passionate and careful reading of Niels Bohr’s quantum
physics, which she finds very illuminating, specially when read diffractively with Butler’s work on
performativity and Foucault’s formulations of discourse. These authors express a firm commitment
with controverting essentialist and substantialising notions about matter, and the unexamined habits
of mind that grant language and other forms of ‘container’ frameworks more power in determining
our ontologies than they deserve (Barad; 2003).

Barad’s reading of Bohr suggests that his insights on quantum physics mark an onto-epistemological
swift from classic mechanics as their metaphysical assumptions begin to crumble, together with its
cartesian remains (Barad; 2003; 2007). For Bohr, the world is not populated with individual things with
their own independent set of determinate properties that pre-exist their encounters, this means that, there
aren't little things wandering aimlessly in the void that posses the complete set of properties that
Newtonian physics assume (Barad; 2007); a deterministic system that reproduces the ancient old
phallogocentric fantasy of destiny, since it is grounded on the assumption that we can always know in
advance the set of forces acting on an object, together with its entire trajectory and initial positioning,
as if we could sit outside of the universe predicting how it unfolds. Barad’s reading of Bohr indicates
that he ‘breaks’ three of metaphysics’ major assumptions: first, the independently determinate
existence of words and things (representationalism); second, the view that the world is composed of
individual entities with individually determinate boundaries and properties (individualism); and third,
the intrinsic separability of knower-and-known (disembodiment2) (Barad; 2007).

Also, it is of utter importance Barad’s actualisation of Bohr’s complementarity principle, which

highlights the need to consider mutually exclusive experimental conditions upon which certain
properties become determinate while others are specifically excluded: put differently, whether
something comes to matter -or not-, only happens by virtue of a particular material-discursive
apparatus, otherwise the nature of a ‘phenomena’ is indeterminate (Barad; 2007; 2008; 20123). Let me
explain this on detail. Barad notes that Foucault’s account of discursive practices has some provocative
resonances, and also some fruitful dissonances, with Bohr’s account of apparatuses and the role they
play in the material production of bodies and meanings: on the one hand, discourse functions as that
what constrains and enables what can be said, on the other, apparatuses are particular physical
arrangements that give meaning to certain concepts to the exclusion of others; so both discourse and
apparatuses are meant to enact a local cut that produces ‘objects’ (Barad; 2003; 2007). This is not to say
that Barad sees Foucault and Bohr as analogous but rather as always already intra-actively co-
constituted, that is, as having the potential to materialise remarkably insightful and productive
differentiating patterns when read through-each-other (Barad; 2012d). What is crucial here is that
apparatuses and discursive material practices are ontological arrangements that determinate what
comes to matter, and simultaneously virtually exclude others from mattering, that is, mattering always
already entails exclusions.

The particle-wave paradox is a noteworthy example introduced by Barad that might helps us to move
towards this ‘object’ formation-and-exclusion aspect. At the beginning of the twentieth century
experimental evidence in quantum physics produced seemingly contradictory results; under certain
experimental circumstances light seemed to behave like waves, but in other experimental
arrangements -apparatuses- light appeared to behave like particles. One of the lessons that can be
learned here is that there is no such thing as the ‘essence’ of light, so what is at stake here is the very
nature of nature, which does not lead us to think that there is no such a thing as nature, as some social
constructivist would often indicate, rather that the nature of nature is queer, so queer that it queers
queerness (Barad; 2012a), that is, that nature always already entails its own ongoing process of

2 I have coined this term, hopefully it expresses what Barad meant here in first place.

3 Also see (Barad; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2012d; 2012e).

(self-)deconstruction which do not necessitate the ‘enactments’ of a human mind or culture to unfold,
so this means that not only specific binaries are destabilised, but even the cuts are iteratively cross-cut
(Barad; 2012; 2012a; 2012b). So if there is still a chance that we can dream again, at least for a moment,
of overcome the regime of sameness, I believe that Barad’s inquiry for the nature of nature can leads us
to the very possibility of a post-humanist ethics which accounts for processes of transformation. I’ll
come back to this later.

However, there is another important lesson here as well: the particle-wave paradox shatters the idea
that beings -or light, in this case- exist as individuals with inherent attributes anterior to their
encounterings. This faith on separated objects rests, of course, on the metaphysical assumption that
there are two distinct and independent kinds of entities, representations and the things to be
represented, Barad notes that this is a cartesian byproduct as well, that functions in some sort of
tripartite arrangement; knowledge (representations), the known (that to be represented), and knower
(someone who sits ‘outside’ and does the representing) (Barad; 2003; 2007). It comes as no surprise
that read diffractively, Barad conceives Bohr’s project as proto-performative at heart, that is, one that
centres on doings or becomings rather than ‘beings’. Like Bohr would assert in relation to light, Butler
emphasises that gender is not an attribute of individuals, some core essence that is variously expressed
through acts, gestures, and enactments, but an iterated doing through which subjects come into being.
Particularly important is that the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but
emerges only within and as the matrix of gendered relations themselves. Here, the idea of bodies -and
matter- as a mute substance, a passive blank slate on which history or culture makes the mark or
gender, is fatally wounded.

Significantly for Barad, Buttler and Bohr, propose a return to the notion of matter outside the surface/
inscription model, that is, as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect
of boundary, fixity, and surface (Barad; 2007). Here quantum physics and feminist philosophy find
themselves at the crossroads, not analogously but as always already entangled, both concerned with
scrutinising metaphysics and the nature’s presumed fixity; what unfolds here is, hopefully an opening
up of the possibilities for change, a transit from being-in-the-world to being-of-the-world. Barad, by
working-through both authors, harness her own agential realist onto-ethic-epistemology which deals
with the limitations of Butler’s anthropocentrism and Bohr’s limited scope on apparatuses. She seeks to
take account of the productive nature of natural as well as cultural forces in the differential
materialisation of both, human and nonhuman bodies (Barad; 2007).

The beautiful murmur between Bohr, Buttler and Foucault, leads Barad to coins the term phenomena,
as a re-elaboration of the classical metaphysical assumption that the primary ontological unit is
composed of independent object which independently determinate boundaries and properties. In Barad’s
agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of non/
human4 bodies; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting
components (Barad; 2007). Following the same principle, intra-action is a neologism that controverts
the idea that bodies pre-exist their encounterings, it contests the usual ‘interaction’, which relies on a
metaphysics of individualism, instead she brings this new term to account how matter and bodies
become or emerge as separate entities by their encountering, rather than being preceded by them. In
particular, phenomena are differential patterns of mattering, or diffraction patterns, produced through
complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices (using Butler’s and Foucault’s
lexicon) or apparatuses of bodily production (if you prefer Bohr’s terminology) where apparatus are
not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices, specific material reconfigurings of
the world which come to matter. Certainly, humans are not a pre-condition of apparatuses, they do not
sit outside of them, rather, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries such as human/
nonhuman, culture/nature, science/social, are constituted (Barad; 2007). As I understand it,

4 From now on non/human = human and nonhuman as it has been suggested in the book queering the non/human. blablabla check the
quote.
phenomena is the world-in-process-of-worlding, that is, reorganizing itself by the boundaries that
emerge when different forces intra-act.

*****
Before fully exhausting Barad’s conceptual framework I would like to dedicate this section to write
about her diffractive approach as it expresses one of the fundamental aspects of her very rich and
many-folded philosophy, specially her response to representationalism and the house of mirrors it
produces. Although diffraction has been gaining a lot academic attention and is often framed as a
methodology, I personally like to see it as a performative theory, or at least certain aspects of it are, so I
have decided to include some elements of it in this literature review, whereas others will be fully
exhausted on the methodological section. I want to be very careful with this because I fear that
diffraction becomes the intersectionality of the decade, this means, being taken as a multipurpose tool
severed from its onto-ethic-epistemological origins and which is transplanted, used and abused in
basically all scientific disciplines for a couple of decades in a very cannibalistic fashion. We had a very
insightful discussion about this last year at the University of Lodz with professor Dorota Golanska
where we asked ourselves whether intersectionality was feminism’s success story or the erratic
production of categorical couplings. Whereas I do not seek to find resolution to this discussion here,
it’s important to remain attentive as it produces me some anxiety to imagine diffraction becoming an
orphan theory in the best BwO’s style, just to lend for a moment Braidotti’s figuration.

Once said this let me emphasise that diffraction holds at its heart a wonderful working-through
metaphysics. Barad notes that representationalism produces optical illusions that have been pervasive
in both, science and philosophy, and often fails to get any closer to solving the problems it poses
because it is caught in the impossibility of stepping outward from its metaphysical starting place
(Barad; 2003; 2007). Social Darwinism, says Barad, exemplifies very well this irresolution, in which it is
not possible to fully fathom who is mirroring who: Darwin’s critics have argued that he takes his
inspiration from social and economic doctrines based on competition and survival of the fittest, reads
them into nature, and then social theorists use Darwin's nature to justify social policy based on natural
selection, saying that they are simply taking their inspiration from nature (Barad; 2007). Following this
direction, biological mimicry embodies the very dangers of seeking innovation through ‘nature’ for
industrial and military purposes in name of human progress (Barad; 2007; 2008).

As Barad seeks to walk-and-work-through this house of mirrors, she grows a healthy skepticism
towards reflexivity, both as a methodology and optical metaphor, as it only displaces the same
elsewhere, setting up anxieties about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real.
Reflexivity, Barad continues, is based on the belief that we have a kind of access to representations that
we don't have to the objects themselves and, that practices of representing have no effect on the objects
of investigation as if we could still hold the world at a distance. Hence, for reflexivity is nothing more
than iterative mimesis, mirrors upon mirrors, so entails the same old geometrical optics of reflections
(Barad; 2007).

In response to this, Barad proposes diffraction as an alternative to get out of the cradle of
representationalism. Like reflection, diffraction is also an optical metaphor, nonetheless it is grounded
in a firm commitment of taking difference and differing as its source: whereas reflection is about
mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference. This is absolutely elucidating and
of utter importance for my research: to some extend, Barad considers this dynamic process of
differentiation as the way matter in its own vitality and historicity reorganises itself in its iterative
becoming. As Haraway, via Barad, puts it: ‘diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical
consciousness at the end of this rather painful Christian millennium, one committed to making a
difference and not to repeating the Sacred Image of Same’, all in all, this is an onto-ethic-epistemology
that resonates with Deleuze’s idea of pure simulacrum, that is, copies without originals, despite of
Haraway’s irritation with the french philosopher5. Now, as a physical phenomena, diffraction has to do
with the way waves combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of waves that
occurs when waves encounter an obstruction, so diffraction is not merely about differences but about
the entangled nature of differences that matter (Barad; 2007).

Certainly, writes Barad, diffraction is a quantum physics phenomenon that inaugurates the downfall of
classical metaphysics. The double-slit experiment, which is at the heart of the wave/particle debate,
namely the very nature of light and matter, shows that there is no sharply delineated boundary that
cuts light from shadow; along both the inside and outside edges there are alternating lines of dark and
light that make the determination of a ‘real’ boundary quite tricky. Perhaps even more surprisingly
there are lines of alternating dark and light even into the very center that corresponds to the notched-
out part of the slit. There is a crucial insight here: diffraction knows no boundaries and brings light and
darkness into a delicate dance without a well defined contour (Barad; 2007), moreover, this
indeterminacy of the ‘outside’ boundary represents the impossibility of closure, in other words,
apparatuses are open-ended practices (Barad; 2003). In view of this, Barad moves us forward a
methodology that enables genealogical analyses of how boundaries are produced rather than presuming
sets of well-worn binaries in advance.

*****
A central issue of boundary de/formation is Barad’s move from cartesian cuts to agential cuts. But
before let me have some few words about what implies a post-humanist vitalist understanding of
matter. In a way, difference and differing in all its beauty is the way that matter makes itself feel; matter
is vital, it can never run out; it’s always transformative. Matter is not a medium or a substrate for the
flow of desire: materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, that is, a reiterative
reconfiguring, energised and energising, enlivened and enlivening. Matter feels, converses, suffers,
desires, yearns and remembers and in this ongoing historicity boundaries do not sit still, they keep
being re-arranged (Barad; 2012e). So in a sense matter is a stabilising and destabilising process of
iterative intra-activity; the very process of boundary de/formation (Barad 2003). However what is
often ‘dismissed’ about matter is that ontologically indeterminacy is always already a constitutive part of
it. Indeterminacy is a radical openness that sits at the heart of mattering, and which sets the conditions
for the possibility of all structures in their dynamically reconfiguring in/stabilities. Matter is never
settled and closure cannot be secured when the conditions of im/possibilities and lived
indeterminacies are integral, not supplementary, to what matter is (Barad; 2012). Movement is always a
path to the unknown, so it is indeterminacy.

Now, all questions regarding the production of differences also leads us to inquire about how matter, in
its iterative becoming, produce separations and exclusions. Hence, to say that matter is always an
ongoing relationality also means to acknowledge that what is at stake in the process becoming is the
production of cuts. This is unescapable, and the point is not to blur the boundaries between categorical
pairs -e.g. human and non-human-, neither to cross out or cancel all distinctions and differences, as
this would immediately collapse into the regime of sameness (Barad; 2008). I am aware that as the
crisis of reason advances, we have grown some healthy skepticism towards cuts, however paranoia
won’t do either, so what we need is a very unusual knife that enhance our desire to work-through,
rather than moving away from, Cartesian cuts and the absolute a priori couplings it supposes. Barad
notes that Cartesian cuts fail us because they rely on metaphysical grounds of transcendental
essentialism and fixity; also they often entail a relationship of absolute exteriority, negation and
pejoration (Barad; 2003)

For this reason, she proposes instead agential cuts, which only make sense as part of-and-in an specific
ongoing phenomena, trying to enact a local resolution within that particular worlding rather than
presuming an immovable divide (Barad; 2003). From this perspective Barad seeks to rehabilitate

5 This was brought to my attention by one of Iris van der Tuin articles.
difference by showing how differing and boundary formation/exclusion is not a relationship of radical
exteriority but of agential separability, or as she likes to call it, exteriority-within, where intra-actions
cut things together-apart as one movement. This entails of course, the ethical response for what’s on
‘either side’ of the cut, rather than amputating and discarding what has been excluded. In other words,
differentiating is a matter of irreducible relations of responsibility, since agential cuts do not seek to
mark some absolute separation but a ‘holding together’ of the disparate without wounding the dis-
jointure, the dispersion, or letting difference collapse into sameness (Barad; 2012b). So if what matters
is build upon the condition of what is excluded from mattering, one can't simply bracket or ignore
certain issues without taking responsibility for the constitutive effects of these exclusions (Barad;
2007).

*****

What is at the heart of agential separability is an ethical call to respond to the Self/Other divide which
has been extensively addressed on this literature review. Although in Meeting the Universe Halfway
(2007) Barad only deals briefly with this issue in the last chapter, for me is clear that she takes a firm
position on this debate, not as something adjacent to her onto-ethic-epistemology but rather, as the
thread that transversally crosses her post-humanist agenda. To do so, she does an enthralling reading
of the sense of touch in relation to the Self-and-Other divide. She notes that from the very beginning
quantum physics has been about contesting classical ideas in which, try as you may, two electrons
would never enter in contact (Barad; 2012). The thing is not that atoms actually do touch each other,
but that they contest any clear boundary of what counts as an ‘individual’ atom, upsetting the very
foundations of the Self. The atom in all its perversity commits the moral violation of touching itself,
and by doing so, enters in contact with the infinite alterity of the Self; the ‘Others’ within which are
virtually infinite (Barad; 2012d). What happens here, she continues, is the feeling of a tender murmur:
many voices speaking in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories,
each of it, diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. Isn’t touching, asks Barad, by its
very nature always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger
within? (Barad; 2007; 2012)

When two hands touch, for instance, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling
of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the Other nearly as close as oneSelf.
Perhaps closer. And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an uncanny sense of
the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of
the stranger within? So much happens in a touch: a sea of Others… Other beings, Other spaces, Other
times (Barad; 2012). So touching entails an infinity alterity, so that touching the Other is touching all
Others, including the Self, and touching the Self, entails touching the strangers within. So this is the
very moment in which the Self, as boundaries, do not stand still. What quantum physics shows us is
that even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude, where each individual always
already includes all possible intra-actions with itSelf through all virtual others, including those that
seem unreachable in time and space (Barad; 2012).

Perhaps touch is the desire for opening to the hospitality of a difference from the Self, that is, a way to
express a sort of indebtedness, where a debt does not follow or results from a transaction but, rather, is
the condition of possibility of giving and receiving (Barad; 2012). Consequently, Barad’s understanding
of touch firmly opposes to other forms of ‘contact’ -e.g. cannibalisation, incorporation, assimilation-,
where touching do not seek to reduce the alterity of the Other who comes to inhabit the sense of feel
(Barad; 2012). In Barad’s account the Other is pure affirmation, since the void, or the dark continent, is
never vacuous, rather, it is the living, breathing indeterminacy of non/being, where indeterminacy is
not a lack, or a loss, but a celebration of the plentitude of nothingness, the ghostly and the ungraspable.
Try as we may, the nothingness is always already within us, or rather, it lives through us. The other is
not just in one's skin, but in one’s bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and
future (Barad; 2007; 2012). Perhaps, wonders Barad, it may well be the inhuman, the insensible, the
irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will helps us face the depths of what
responsibility entails. That is, a cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, and infinitude
multitude of indeterminate liminal beings diffracted through different spacetimes (Barad; 2012). This
is truly insightful when read through Butler’s work on precariousness, specially in view of the-face-
that-is-not-a-face.

So she throws us a playful provocation: what if it takes sensing the abyss, the edges of the limits of
‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ before all binaries -e.g. inside/outside, human/nonhuman, mattering/not-
mattering- can be seriously troubled? What if it is only in facing the indeterminate non/being non/
becoming of mattering and not mattering that an ethics committed to the rupture of indifference can
arise? What if it is only in the encounter with the liminality of no/thingness in all its liveliness, its
conditions of im/possibility, that we can truly confront our actions lacking in compassion? (Barad;
2012). In other words, the nature of matter always already entails an exposure to the Other, so
responsibility is not an obligation that the subject chooses but rather an incarnate relation that
precedes the intentionality of consciousness. There is no need for the human here, as to be responsible
is not a calculation but a relation integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not-
becoming (Barad; 2012).

Barad has manifested in a couple of interviews that she is aware that some people might feel anxious by
a form of ethics that cannot be localised in the human consciousness (Barad; 2012e), but here is when
specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world can truly flare up. This particular
form of openness means that entanglements are relations of obligation, being bound to the other,
perhaps in a very scary way to begin with (Barad; 2012b), but then, response-ability is precisely
opening up a space for response; making an invitation to the Other to respond by putting oneself at
risk, namely touching, sensing, intra-acting. This is, says Barad lending from Levinas, troubling oneself
-or rather, the Self- as the root of caring, since ethics never comes from a peaceful place (Barad; 2012).
This is at heart of vulnerability: being exposed, naked to the outside, to the world’s being in such a way
that we are bound, whether we like it or not, or whether we have brains or not, to answer for it by
getting in touch with our own alterity; an ongoing rupture. And by doing so we participate in the
process of working-through these boundaries that seem so intimidatingly sedimented (Barad; 2012).
Perhaps queering is the present continuos verb that best describes to agree to undergo a
transformation we cannot fully fathom: queer is itself a lively mutating organism, a desiring radical
openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/continuity, an enfolded
reiteratively materialising promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality (Barad; 2012b).